Fireworks rise over a sea that recovered. Higashimatsushima sits near Matsushima Bay—one of the three most celebrated views in Japan, a scatter of pine-clad islands across calm water—and it is a place that bore terrible wounds in the disaster of 2011, when the sea that gives the region its beauty came ashore and took so much. And here, each summer, the fireworks rise. Fire to mourn the dead and to hearten the living, opening over the seaside green where people gather in the warm dark. Matsushima Bay is gentle now, the water calm again among its hundred islands, and the light scatters across a sea that has long since returned to its ordinary, ravishing beauty. This is a coast that lived by the sea, was tested by the sea, and rose again alongside the sea—choosing, despite everything, to stay. There is a particular weight to celebration in such a place, a brightness that has passed through grief and come out the other side. The summer fireworks over Higashimatsushima are quiet in their meaning and strong in their resolve: a community lighting the sky above the water that broke it, and that it has, against all odds, forgiven.